Yohji Yamamoto. Fall 2019 RTW – Paris Fashion Week

(Images from Vogue.com and wwd.com the public domain. All rights. Used in promotion of the designer.)

Yohji Yamamoto's Read-to-Wear Fall 2019 collection has him moving further into a darker realm.  As, the world faces many challenges to overcome. These challenges are also within, the self. For too long we yearn to direct the outside without pacifying and cultivating the inside. So, this is Yamamoto's mourning utilizing the feminine as its grace, while the Fashion world feels the loss of an icon Karl Lagerfeld.  Yamamoto who is now in his mid seventies, representing through his Fall 2019 collection, bereavement that is both a fixture of life and death.  It is what we fear as human beings, to be alone.  For the male and female, the emotion is the same and not many can face this, yet one should understand and embrace 'nothingness'.  Not be afraid if it.  To be alone, despite the erosion of life through time, is power. To draw from it and absorb it back into the self. To face the darkness is to know light, to be an ally of the self is to be aware that weakness will always collectively assign itself to an ideology.  Be it religion or otherwise - for what might feel like comfort, it may hold only ghosts.  We should gently put the past to rest.

The feminine knows the significance of mourning, as she mourns both life and death simultaneously. For her, throughout history she has laid witnesses and suffered the loss of fathers, sons and brothers.  Through wars and their misaligned beliefs, all the while masculinity has been used as tools for the aristocracy and religious orders. It is a blood soaked world.  And she understands this, while at he same time she is succumbed by her own prescience of narcissism.  As a need to survive, to be wanted and appreciated by the male. This is neither a curse of biology or a social inscribed theology as a reason for oppressive identity of religious control. The layering of clothing and exuding of style is to accentuate the hidden, within its suggestion of the desirable. Not to avert the male gaze, which has been a terrible affliction onto women via the main theocratic religions. That in all retrospect should be not allowed to encroach too much into a secular society. Whether, certain brands and markets choose to appeal to religious cultures. It is entirely a business decision. Yamamoto, reveals the exclusivity, utilizing layers and folds with expose of flesh, keeps the appeal within that projections of alluring narcissistic cues.

For his Fall 2019 collection, there is a subtle and blunt folding of material, to which Yamamoto is famous for, utilizing wools, but crafting the material so it contours and shapes the female form.  Such a mastered skill of many years of understanding the machinations of fine wool, its heaviness and draped dynamics. The darkness and sombre affair with this collection, is because the collection is overtly black in its representation. Not uncommon for Yamamoto's stylization, but the darkness is pushed intensively as a showpiece, there are some pattern work, intertwined with white and grey neutrality. However, the heavily applied darkened lipstick of the models sets the overall melancholy allurement.

The cloaked styles towards the end of Yamamoto's Paris show, have been viewed as a homage to the costume mysticism of the Peruvian, Tapada limeña phenomenon of the Spanish Colony (1600s), where women of the town would cover the entire body wrapped by a black fabric, only to reveal a single eye peering out. From historical  records it was a fashion trend, that also was also embraced by the women in Spain, which indicated that women felt sexual power dressed in such a way, envloping within her own mystic, she began to weave the possibilities of indiscretions with 'other' men without it affecting her reputation. To the extent the Church at the time was alarmed at its subversive nature.  It had very little to do with the submivisness of the hjib.

 The Tapada limeña was all about sex.